ONE moment you’re conscious, the next you’re not. For the first time,
researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a
single brain area.

Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a
century, exploring their function by zapping them with electricity and
temporarily putting them out of action. Despite this, they have never been
able to turn off consciousness – until now.
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Objectives: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is common in military personnel,
and there is growing concern about the long-term effects of TBI on the
brain; however, few studies have examined the association between TBI and
risk of dementia in veterans.

Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study of 188,764 US veterans
aged 55 years or older who had at least one inpatient or outpatient visit
during both the baseline (2000–2003) and follow-up (2003–2012) periods and
did not have a dementia diagnosis at baseline. TBI and dementia diagnoses
were determined using ICD-9 codes in electronic medical records. Fine-Gray
proportional hazards models were used to determine whether TBI was
associated with greater risk of incident dementia, accounting for the
competing risk of death and adjusting for demographics, medical
comorbidities, and psychiatric disorders.
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Use of hypothermia in babies at risk of brain damage lessens risk of long-term disability.

Erika Check Hayden

09 July 2014

Nearly 750,000 babies born each year in the United Kingdom are at risk of
brain damage because of low oxygen during birth.

Cooling babies who are at risk of brain damage provides long-lasting
prevention of such injuries, researchers report today in the New England
Journal of Medicine1.

A team led by Denis Azzopardi, a neonatologist at King’s College London,
lowered the body temperature of 145 full-term babies who were born after
at least 36 weeks of gestation. All were at risk of brain damage because
they had been deprived of oxygen during birth.

The researchers cooled the infants to between 33°C and 34°C for 72 hours,
starting within 6 hours of birth. The technique is known to boost the
chances that children avoid brain damage until they become toddlers2, but
any longer-term benefits have remained unclear.

The study finds treated babies had better mental and physical health than
untreated infants through to ages 6 or 7: they were 60% more likely to
have normal intelligence, hearing and vision. Those who survived to
childhood also had fewer disabilities such as difficulty walking and
seeing.

“The bottom line is that this doubles a child’s chance of normal
survival,” says David Edwards, a neonatologist at King’s College London
and an author of the study.
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Researchers use optogenetics to provide the first hard evidence that long-term potentiation at brain synapses is crucial for memory formation

Optogenetics Optogenetics allows researchers to control the activity of nerve cells using pulses of laser light delivered into the brain with an optical fibre.

A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, has determined the cellular mechanism of memory formation, putting an end to decades of speculation about the matter.

Most neuroscientists agree that memory formation involves the strengthening of synapses in the brain, and have assumed that this strengthening occurs by a form of synaptic plasticity called long-term potentiation (LTP), even though there was no hard evidence that this is the case.

The new research uses state-of-the-art neurotechnology to show not only that that the strengthening of synapses by LTP is required for the formation of fearful memories, but also that weakening of the same synapses by a similar, opposing mechanism can erase the memories.

LTP was discovered in the 1960s by a Norwegian scientist named Terje Lømo, who was using pairs of electrodes to examine the activity of nerve cells in the rabbit hippocampus. Lømo used one electrode to stimulate cells in one region, and the other to simultaneously measure changes in the activity of connected cells in a neighbouring area.
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